When I was in graduate school from 1998-2004, my professors and mentors talked about one strategy for getting science to the public—publishing journal articles. As problematic as the peer review process is, producing science still remains the best source of knowledge on the path to enlightenment. For instance, across 30 years, Gallup found that Americans consistently believe violence and crime keeps getting worse than the year before despite sociological data showing a steady, systematic decline in the United States (with a few exceptions such as Chicago). With the continual influx of new information, and refinements about previous knowledge, the importance of scientific communication becomes increasingly important.
Publishing scientific articles in peer-reviewed journal articles is just the beginning of educating the public about science. Consider this—a scientific article that is cited 100 times is considered “a classic” (actual term used by a distinguished professor evaluating a faculty member for tenure). Should we rejoice because 100 people mentioned an article? Take a moment to ponder this metric of impact. Most readers probably don’t get beyond the abstract in reading an article and merely hunt on Google Scholar to find something, anything, to support a claim they wanted to make. And they chose your article because it showed up in the first 10 Google results and a PDF was available with one click. I don’t want to bust your bubble of self-importance. I want you to consider other ways to get your work to a larger audience. An audience who would be interested to uncover recent discoveries about human behavior – especially if you can provide a compelling rationale for why they should care and how the results are important to them. As of today, there are approximately 325,700,000 living in the United States and 7,632,819,325 in the world. It is time to reconsider the value of working for 2-3 years to conduct research and 1 additional year to publish this work in a scientific journal, only to be read by .0000013% of the world. Here are some suggestions for how to get the science to a greater proportion of society [NOTE: I am going to use myself as an example to offer concrete ideas and potential costs and benefits for the simple reason I know myself better than the scientists I follow such as Drs. Maya Tamir, Dacher Keltner, and Mark Leary].
